The investments made last year by Umeme is finally paying off as the Ugandan company states they have seen a huge improvements in power supply in the last few weeks. Umeme’s Managing Director, Selestino Babungi, said “What we have seen is where we have done these investments; the dividends are already coming through in terms of improvement of the reliability of supply. You will note that in the period of January through the elections, power has been reliable across the country.” Daniel Birungi also added “Definitely, there has been a major improvement. We have seen new innovations, such as the disaggregation of consumption into extra-large, large, medium and domestic consumers. This has been critical in driving productivity among the large consumers. We have also seen the rebate system and the declining block tariff, which have supported productivity.”
NEW EQUIPMENT
Umeme spent almost 700 million on this investment over the last 15 years of its operation in Uganda and it has mainly been to put up buildings which total at 7 for now. It was this that helped bring down the electricity transmission. A number of these investments were approved under the Electricity regulations 2020. Eskom is one of those licensees that have invested quite a bit of money at its Nalubaale and Kiira hydropower generation complex. In the past three years, between 2018 and 2020, Eskom invested $133 million (about Shs 50bn) in both the Nalubaale and Kiira power plants in order to improve their operation capacity, as well as increase the lifespan of Nalubaale.
The company made the statement that “Many of the projects are replacements done with upgrade in mind to preserve the assets and improve operational efficiency in line with prudent utility practices, This investment is to ensure that plant performance is enhanced for the long term so as to maintain power production. As a result, Nalubaale Plant performance has remained steady, which is important to the sector and economy since Nalubaale provides the cheapest power to the grid.”
Birungi went on to say that the numbers on investments in the industry of electricity supply are quite colourful, and it was high time that these challenges came to a close with the individual companies resolving the problems. He went on to say “When we ask for timelines of when the power will be back on after an outage, we have noticed fluffing on the other side (distribution side). This has raised the costs of production. Remember, I have to pay the workers, whether the machines are running or not, as long as they report to duty. “If power goes off while there is a batch of cement in the production line that batch goes bad. And that is a loss to the company.”
